By the late 1830s, Simms’s
reputation and fame were on a steady rise; on the
strength of romances like The Yemassee and
The Partisan, Simms was widely
regarded as one of antebellum America’s finest writers. At this point, the always self-conscious
novelist made one of the more curious decisions of his literary career by
reworking a piece of verse-drama juvenilia into the novel Pelayo: A Story of the Goth,
published in two volumes by Harper & Brothers of New York in 1838. In writing Pelayo, Simms left the romantic epics of America’s history and
frontier on which ...